Nice Girls Don't
by Akazukin Elle
Summary: Nice girls don't, but Rinoa finally does. (Warning: Eventual femmeslash, mild language, drivel.)
1. Hit and Miss

Nice Girls Don't  
FF8 femmeslash for the bored shipper  
by Akazukin Elle (November 27th, 2002)

God, she looked tired. There were purplish bags underneath her eyes, which seemed to take up half her face; did others see her as she saw herself, twenty-five, too old, and tired?

The mirror, framed with exquisite Trabian mahogany, stared back at her; and when her fingers fluttered up to brush her cheecks, so the reflection's fingers did, and when she sighed, the reflection's chest heaved as though under some great stress or labour. She winced at how pale and drawn her face was. So pathetic. Such a skinny underfed girlchild, even in a woman's body.

A knock on the bathroom door made her glance up guiltily from her vanities. "I'm leaving," he said, and if his voice was less abrupt in the morning, who could tell? "I'll be back around six." Which meant, could dinner and a drink be ready by six? He didn't have to ask anymore. "I love you, Rinoa." Added gruffly, reluctantly. It was particularly like him not to want to say it.

"I love you, too," she echoed, her voice high, distant, a little-girl voice.

She didn't.

*

The sunlight seemed sterile that morning, as she locked the door behind her; it did not really warm the early spring's air, only added to the shadows light and filtered through the windows, giving, to the unknowing spectator, a false impression of spring. The town of Balamb spread out behind her as she fumbled with her keys. It was awfully small -- or so she'd always thought -- but, at eighteen, newly-wed, and blissfully ignorant, it had seemed perfect. Simplistic. Easy.

How foolish to think that life could be any of those, a temperate valley through which one journeyed and found solace. How foolish, to think that you could stop your journey just so, at eighteen -- with a light heart and tired feet but years ahead of you.

Stupid, yes, to fall in love with one man and then another and to think that your heart was going to remain steady. Didn't she already know about how dust settled on things you'd never expect? Hadn't she promised to protect herself when she'd left?

And yet, here she was, no so many years later, being the protected one.

Shoes loud on the cobblestone streets, she set out.

She knew what some of them said about her, when those old days came up. Slut. Easy. Whore. Helpless. Weak.

And every time she heard it -- when women whispered as she passed them, or when the news had a slow day, or the million other ways poison can drip into one's ear -- she felt that old girlish anger twist her stomach. It was not a burning anger, the kind she read about in cheap paperbacks, which she read when she had nothing else to do, because they helped to etherize the edges of her day, even reinforced that what she did every day was all right, even when it was the furthest thing from all right. She fancied, in her poetic moments -- few though they were -- that it was a reasonable anger. Logical, even, to be outraged that people would say such things about her.

Her!

Hadn't she done good things? Led a resistance? Even helped to save the world?

Why was she, out of all of them, the slut among the heroes?

Her steps were quick and brisk against the road. Decided. She felt mildly, quietly determined. Today.

She was not considered intelligent, but today -- today had required her to plan, to lie, to scheme, in short had required her to use her brain, guile, and whatever else she had to make it happen. She was intelligent, she thought, in the brighter moments where it looked like it might work; she knew it had to happen, anyway, even if it was sort of desperately ingrained. She'd spent so many years trapped in that impersonal dungeon that she'd shrink into nothing if it didn't.

She had been her own jailer, after all.

The spring air blew her hair behind her shoulders, pressed her short floral-print skirt against her thighs, raised the hair on her arms and neck; it was still too early for flowers to bloom and the sun to colour the grass. The ocean was a dark teal, green and gray and wild above its depths; she could hear the waves rocking the docks in the harbour, but the sound was so familiar after seven years that she only noticed it when the squealing of rusty hinges rose in pitch and shrieked into the wind.

She stepped past Ma Dincht. "G'day, Rinoa," crackled the sunburnt, matronly old woman, rocking in her wicker chair even though it was really too cold to sit outside. Rinoa looked down at her -- Mrs. Dincht's deck was below street-level -- and smiled, though it may have gone across as half a grimace. Her lips felt funny as they twisted.

"Good morning, Mrs Dincht," she said; anyway, who could tell? The woman was old.

She walked on, and took a deep breath to calm herself, filling her lungs until they ached and then exhaling loudly. One of the few things she could do to calm the nerves that battled in her stomach was to breathe regularly, instead of in hitched, panicked, desperate little gasps.

Besides, hyperventilating was never a sign of good mental health.

She wondered; would the air smell different there? Would she remember it, or would it be desperately new, fresh, stinging? It would be colder, and she knew she ought to have worn pants, but she had looked in her closet that morning and panicked. It was the one thing that she hadn't planned, although she usually planned her wardrobe with extreme care and preparation. Not because he was critical of her clothing -- like he'd notice! -- but she had always been a little bit sensitive on the subject of clothing.

Was it shallow to like pretty clothes?

She turned a corner and saw the train station, and was half shocked to see it there, like it always was -- tall, with the faint scent of diesel lingering in the air around it. This time, for the first time since she had begun, she did not turn to flee.

She nodded at a few of the townspeople as she climbed the steps, proud of herself for not wobbling on her pumps. Silly thing to be proud of, after all these years, but, oh, she was. It had taken her months and months -- practically two years, when she was thirteen and fourteen -- to walk in heels with any semblance of grace or dignity.

Besides, sometimes you had to take pride where you got it.

She stepped up to the ticket window.

"Hello," she said, with that brilliant white Heartilly smile. First rule: Don't show fear.

"Hello, ma'am," said the teller pleasantly. Nothing out of the norm here. "Where to?"

"Dollet." No weight nor significance marked her mild tone; she was carefully impartial. "In coach -- as soon as you can. One way. I don't know how long I'll be staying," she explained with an embarrassed smile, because everyone knew everyone in Balamb. Rule two: Make your story and stick to it.

"I hear it's cold there," commented the teller unassumingly, tapping a code into her computer. The sounds of printing could be heard from over the counter. "Have a good trip; the next train to Dollet Town leaves in two hours; you'll have to switch at Deling and take the sea transport. It's all on your ticket. You may board immediately, ma'am. Have a nice day!" She handed over a freshly-printed ticket and sat back, work done. It was slow in the mornings.

"Thank you," she said, took her ticket, and turned, spinning dark hair and pink floral around her. Two hours would be interminable and panicked.

Rule three: Don't look back.

*

The first thing she did when she reached Dollet, before finding the apartment she'd rented or water to wash away the stale taste of the recycled air on the train, was to have her hair cut. It would take a day or so before they got worried and began to look, and the years between herself and fame had bought her some degree of anonymity. However, with too-long hair and features that had not changed so much since they had been splashed across magazines and video screens, she needed all the help she could get.

And, besides, it was hot in the summer and too heavy all 'year round. She hadn't had it cut above her shoulders since she was a little girl, and her nanny had insisted that she grow it out so that it could be put into plaits and tied with ribbons.

Sitting in the hairdresser's chair -- it was a cheap, low-profile place, but it smelled like shampoo and hairspray, scents that put her in mind of being pampered no matter where she was -- she decided on a blunt, shoulder-length cut. It was not very good for flowing in the wind -- better, she discovered later, for flying into her face -- but it was easy to brush. Simple. Unglamourous. That, she thought, was decently enough a disguise, or part of one. She ducked into a drugstore and bought a few silly, cute barrettes to keep her new short hair out of her eyes. She only thought once or twice of how Squall might have rolled his eyes, or, worse, been totally oblivious.

She was not anyone's arm decoration. If she wanted to wear pink chocobo-shaped barrettes, then she damn well would.

She just hoped that her resolve wouldn't waver after this initial high of total freedom had faded. She'd read books for women like that in the Balamb library, with titles like Y'all Come Back, Now: The Guide to a Happy Marriage and Get Lost! Tell Your Man to Hit the Snow Fields. (Both were, incidentially, written by the same author, one Selphie Tilmett, formerly Selphie Kinneas and Selphie Dincht -- always vocal and twice divorced, she'd been a minor celebrity in Balamb for her two international successes. Her third book, Get that Festival Moving!, failed miserably in the markets, and she settled down to a life in Fisherman's Horizon as an image consultant.)

Rinoa wondered how often the books were right. Certainly, she was not a favourite of statistics.

*

Next on the list of things to do, hair firmly out of her mind, was, obviously, her apartment. She'd spent more time procuring that than she had on anything else, since it required the most subterfuge, the most cunning. She'd had to invent a new name, an identity, an occupation, a family -- and, worst of all, she'd been forced to do it in her own home, between vaccuuming and cooking and dinner parties with their friends. The evidence had always been so close, always within his reach. Her breath caught any time he went near her desk, even though the drawer was locked and if he'd bothered to look . . . but he hadn't. Wouldn't have invaded her privacy. Wasn't that what he was always saying?

She had thanked God often that he wasn't bright enough -- or cared too little -- or hadn't enough suspicion -- to check on her. It was perversely disappointing that he didn't, sometimes, although she had begun to see the worst in what he did, no matter what. She had become so bitter -- and hated herself for it, feared what it could do to her -- that everything he'd said had carried some malicious nuance. He didn't care about her. He hated her cooking. He thought she was too fat. He was sleeping with Selphie.

And, of course, Squall wasn't like that, not at all. Self-centred, yes, but never cruel.

It was just, simply, that she didn't love him in the least, and maybe never had. Looking back on it -- on her old little-girl act, her helpless "Save me, Squall!" days -- she wondered whether it had been love for him, or simply love for what she wanted him to be, that spurred her onwards.

How had she ever wanted someone else to save her? Someone to keep her locked away, to protect her, to shut her away from everything -- not just the bad things, but the really good, the joy and the pain and the sorrow? How could she have wanted to be a picture on an urn?

The landlord gave her the keys without any hassle. Looking upon her new home, she guessed that she may have been afraid of something like this -- a gray, water-stained old building missing shingles on the sides. It needed a new coat of pain. It was poverty-stricken, probably unsafe, definitely cheap -- and it was funny how it looked so beautiful compared to the quaint little house that waited for her in Balamb. How funny that the bleached-out, stained carpet, the broken bedframe, and the ratty old furniture could be more appealing to her than the expensive mahogany and tile that had been her pride and joy for so many years?

She supposed the best thing about it was that it was hers. She'd paid for it, and they'd never look for her in the inexpensive, unsophisticated part of town, no matter what else happened. A lot they knew! Hadn't she camped for weeks with her resistance? Hadn't she even saved the world's heroes (for whom she was the contrasting slut-turned-good-eventually, she thought unhappily) from the desert prison, done without food or sleep for days on end, fought Ultimecia, battled like they all had?

And all they remembered in the end was that she liked pretty things, and comfortable homes, and that she hated camping and fighting and conflict. That she sometimes cried, or hesitated, or even balked at going on.

She felt very stupid and young, even though she was twenty-five and wasn't that supposed to be old?

She didn't cry over these things (despite crying being the usual female response, she tiredly supposed); rather, she fretted herself into insomnia, and, on the worst days, worried herself into drinking until the edges on Squall and their friends and her ugly loveless marriage seemed very far away.

It was finally on a particularly hungover morning that she began to plan her escape. (That sounded dramatic even to her, when she put it in so many words; but, regardless, that was what it was.) Over a cup of dark roast and the morning edition of Balamb Today, she had decided to leave her cute little house.

She often wondered at how it had all come together. First the right time, then the right place, then the right way, and, finally, the right day -- what she was finally living out. It took her back to her days of rebellion.

She felt as though she ought to exult at that, and a part of her did, because she'd always been a little bit contrary, and it felt like she was fighting again.

She hadn't fought in so long she'd nearly forgotten what had made her start in the first place.

Nice girls don't start wars they can't win.

To be continued.

Author's Note: Whoosh. Don't know quite where that came from. Wrote it in a swift few hours during school this afternoon, and it will eventually be Quistis/Rinoa, although this part's fairly general. There are a few references to various poets in this -- the obvious ones are Eliot's "temperate valleys" and "journeys" from Journey of the Magi, as well as Keats' urn from Ode on a Grecian Urn -- and, no, I don't own them, nor do I own Rinoa or Squall or even Mrs Dincht. I mean, I'd like to, but you can all see how well that goes over. 

This story is dedicated to my dear Tami (Guardian), who refused to dedicate her piece of "depressing femmeslash drivel" to me, but I have no such restraint, and will happily dedicate my femmeslash drivel to her. Besides, she did it first and best. 

Many thanks go to, um, mes professeurs, for not noticing when I didn't take notes in their classes. They rock. This will be continued at a later date, possibly not for a long time, because I'm lazy. Thank you!

--Lauren (Nov.27.02)


	2. Let Down

Nice Girls Don't  
Chapter Two: Let Down   
  
It was hard, those first few weeks. Harder than she'd expected, and, somehow, much longer, too, as though the weeks of waiting and praying and planning had all come to a conclusion that seemed to turn time into molasses -- warm brown and sweet but flowing at too slow a pace. It was like climbing a mountain over the course of several days; except, of course, that the next day always seemed to bring a fuller breath of air and a heady sense of total freedom.   
  
She took on the alias Julianna Caraway; it did not occur to her how obvious her alias was. It was a way of remembering the past, and unlike her elaborately-written previous signature, she wrote it in quick, dark strokes of the pen. It was interesting, to be able to change her handwriting, to be able to print instead of write longhand: she'd never done it before. Thank-you notes and sympathy letters and birthday cards did not require her to be unfrivolous, and for the Timber Owls they'd always used electronics so that they wouldn't be traced or analysed. Now, when it was just her and job applications and grocery lists she was rarely able to complete, she distracted herself by reshaping her letters, trying to write with the wrong hand, printing too large or too small to be useful. She dotted her i's with hearts and stars and circles, with slashes and not at all, and uncurved the ends of her t's, and forgot the curlicues on her curvy letters.   
  
There she was. She sat in her small, dingy kitchen, turning the pages of a homemade scrapbook. Her skin was dry -- Dollet was a dry, dry city in the winter, with cold air and low humidity -- but her fingernails were neatly clipped. She'd always taken pride in her fingers; had always thought that perhaps she'd have been a piano player in another life, like her mother had been. She had long fingers, octave-and-a-half fingers, with broad palms and small wrists. A mug of tea sat to her left, at her elbow; steam rose from its top. The mug itself was chipped, but had once been white porcelain, with a delicate pattern of flowers up to the rim along the handle: hairline cracks in the paint had long since ruined it for company, but it made her smile.   
  
She didn't know why. Odd things seemed to make her smile lately; children playing in the street, an old woman scolding her cat for being out too late, a baby wailing in the grocery store -- things that reminded her of Balamb, she supposed, except that Balamb, in the years since the wars and the end of the world, had become much posher than Dollet. Dollet was the workingman's city, full of young mothers and men in suits which fit them badly -- a far cry from the Dollet Rinoa had known. Her father would have hated it there, amongst the bluecollars and wailing children, amidst the thick scent of smog and baby powder and mountain wildflowers.   
  
She loved it. Loved their coarse language, loved their clothing, loved their joy and their depression, loved how she could walk among them and not affect a single person simply by being there. She loved how, to them, Julianna Caraway was nothing more than a job-hunter -- not a hostess, not a princess, not some destined sorceress, not a whore. She had been somebody for too long, and now that she was nobody she was enjoying walking without chains dragging on the sidewalk and creaking as she moved.   
  
The scent of bergamot and spice warmed the room considerably. She was a little bit lonely in this dark little place, with its small windows and dingy curtains: not lonely for the cleaning, which she almost-loathed, but lonely for somebody to do it for -- but when she thought that she took another sip of tea and burnt her tongue and tried not to think it again, for she would not go back to Squall because she wanted to clean for him.   
  
Nor for any other reason.   
  
But it was very lonely, and very quiet, and she often found that she had to leave the apartment complex just to feel sane again.   
  
Funny, how often she'd craved the redemption of silence before: now she loathed the thick long nights she spent sitting and waiting for the telephone. She had the vague impression that this was what she ought to have been doing many years before, biting her lip and waiting for a phone call with her fingers crossed.   
  
When the phone rang, she jumped and scrambled for it, fingers trembling. She had filled out so many applications, but neither she nor her alter-ego had any sort of experience, nothing beyond seven long slow unsweet years of marriage to distinguish her from anyone else. She had applied to as a short-order cook, as a nanny, as a street-sweeper, as a clerk, as a salesperson, as a maid --   
  
And had had so many interviews that she couldn't remember what had been which and only remembered that she had done brilliantly in some and terribly in all the others, tongue-tied with remembering that she was not Rinoa Heartilly anymore and with lying. Lying was not a tone that suited her; it rang false for her and probably for them, and she was so worried that she would get a job --   
  
"Hello?" she asked breathlessly, in her funny little girl's voice which sounded too high in her hears.   
  
The voice at the other end was tired and it inquired as to whether it was speaking with Julianna Heartilly of 402 Strawrick Place; Rinoa could not tell whether a man or a woman was speaking, she never could with low voices over the phone, and so she just said, "Yes," and prayed to any little gods or ancestors that she might have had.   
  
The person was Mary Stilling of the Rainbow Life Preschool Centre, and she was calling about the interview.   
  
"You are?" There was a hint of excited shriek in her voice, but, of course, that was only natural. A job! A job with children!   
  
And the lady on the other end said that they'd like to give her a trial if she was still looking for a job, and she nearly shrieked and jumped up and down, but caught herself just in time to accept gracefully -- "I would love to thank you thank you thank you" -- and hang up before she sounded like a complete fool.   
  
The elation was a drug: achievement was so new to her these days, new all over again if you wanted the cliche, fresh and exciting and hers, thank God.   
  
Her happiness had a strange obscurity to it. She thought she would never have to fight again, that the journey had been the battle and she'd won and now everything would lift her instead of pushing her down, in this strange rebuilt Dollet where she was.   
  
And how the hopeful fall.   
  
*   
  
She was glad for the invention of anti-perspirant as she sat in the office of the Rainbow Life Preschool Centre, wearing her best shabby skirt and her best shabby blouse and her best jacket, which was not shabby at all. The chair she was sitting on was tall and her feet nearly dangled from it; she felt herself blushing with indignity. She was not quite child-sized herself -- nearly five and a half feet, give (well, take) two or three inches -- but it seemed like everyone was taller than she was. She thought back to chapter sixteen of Selphie's festival flop ("Stand Up Straight and Smile or They'll Tear You to Pieces! :) A Guide to Being Calm and Collected") and sat up straighter. She'd been there all morning, running after small children and talking to the other teachers and aides.   
  
"Well," said Mary Stilling, who had long feminine features and a thick waste and a sympathetic smile. "You don't have any marketable skills. You've never been to college, and you didn't finish school. You don't have any references or any previous jobs, and, quite frankly, you could be a serial killer."   
  
Her heart dropped into her shoes. Yet another "please look elsewhere", and here she was, too old and too dumb for school. She would never ever be hired; she'd have to live in a tent; she hated living in tents.   
  
"But," continued the older woman, "you're good with the kids, especially the way you dealt with Timmy earlier today. He's a biter -- you have to watch out or you'll hurt them, but you're gentle, and that's good. You can read properly, and you're athletic, which we need; you've got a posh voice, which'll make the parents happy. They like to think the kids are somewhere learning manners, instead of throwing mud at eachother." Rinoa tittered uneasily. "So I'm going to offer you the job, but it's a learning position -- you'll be sort of a student, and you'll be at the bottom of the ladder, and you're going to work harder than you've worked in your life -- " You ever tried to steal a tentacle from a Malboro after being back-attacked, lady? -- "but I think you'll be good at it, if you choose to be."   
  
Rinoa did not squeal, because that would have been unprofessional. Instead, she shrieked and threw her arms around the older woman and jumped up and down.   
  
Very professional.   
  
Unfazed, Mary grinned -- surprisingly, because Rinoa had thought women named Mary just smiled politely and sipped tea. "And if you're good, which I won't promise you, we'll even recommend you to the teachers' college -- if you want us to, that is. I like your enthusiasm, Miss Heartilly."   
  
It was a good day.   
  
*   
  
Good days continued to happen, and after one particularly long one -- though good -- she walked through the streets with streaks of (thankfully water-soluble) green paint in her dark hair and on her fair face.   
  
She was tired and happy and warm, and she'd decided -- as a treat -- to buy herself a cup of hot coffee, rather than depending on her undependable little percolator which, like everything else she now owned, had been bought second hand. It tended to leak while she was at work, which she'd discovered a few days ago after her first long, exhausting day chasing four-year-olds across the playground.   
  
She wondered why she'd never thought about having children. She liked them, even Timmy the Terror who'd had the audacity to bite her more than once that day; they were cute and they could use her attention much more than anyone else. Plus, the pay was all right.   
  
Certainly more than she'd made washing stupid Squall's stupid floors, which was flowers on her birthday and boring sex every other night (pending other, more important worries.) She loved not being recognized when she went places; she even loved this humid too-warm rundown little cafe in the middle of nowhere, next to the Time Industries building -- the only important building in all of bloody Dollet, so far as she knew.   
  
She sipped her coffee blissfully and let her mind wander. It wandered so far, in fact, that she jumped when a hand touched her shoulder and a low voice said, "Rinoa?" And then she spun around in her chair, gracefully not knocking the coffee over, and shrieked because someone had just said her name and she was in so much trouble and oh God oh God oh God -- "Calm down," Quistis Trepe said very calmly, and Rinoa's mind stopped, because she was staring up at five feet, ten inches of tall, bespectacled blonde.   
  
Perhaps unfortunately, she said the first thing that popped into her mind: "You've lost your twinset."   
  
But thankfully Quistis just raised an eyebrow and said, "You've lost your husband."   
  
And Rinoa found herself blushing hard because it was just like Quistis to have comebacks ready like she herself never did, but she was quite sure -- almost, pretty much sure -- that Quistis wasn't there to drag her back to Squall, because she hadn't seen Quistis since before her wedding and it just made sense for both of them to be in Dollet, she thought.   
  
"What on -earth- are you doing in Dollet?" Quistis asked, obviously with other ideas.   
  
"Having coffee," replied Rinoa, and she felt immediately stupid and blushed harder and oh, God, this always happened to her around sophisticated people, so she made the best of the situation and added, "Would you like to sit down?"   
  
Quistis sat gracefully in the way that Rinoa never could. She was wearing a simple pantsuit, navy, with a white blouse that was unbuttoned just enough to look fashionable without looking risque. Rinoa was suddenly quite aware that she had finger-paint in her hair and on her face, and that she herself was wearing jeans and a stretchy t-shirt and a necklace with a plastic monkey strung on it because one of her students had shyly presented it to her that day and she'd been delighted.   
  
"It's been a long time," Quistis said, taking a short sip of whatever was in her steaming mug, probably tea because she had always remembered Quistis having tea when she needed caffeine. "The last time I saw you, you were bullying Squall into wearing a proper shirt under that ridiculous jacket he had."   
  
Rinoa snorted and looked down. "He never did wear the stupid shirt," she muttered.   
  
"Fashion's different when you're young." Quistis smiled a self-deprecating smirk. "I already know you remember my twinset. I thought it looked professorish." Rinoa noted that Quistis still had the same old wireframes, a little bit tarnished from the many years, but obviously so comfortable that they weren't even noticeable to the wearer anymore.   
  
Her coffee was cooling rapidly, but she was in no mood to drink it. She giggled; she rarely laughed outright. "Remember how we always had to fix your skirt?" she asked, leaning forward to look at Quistis with her elbows supporting her weight on the table. "It was always getting torn; that one time, with the Malboro, when it got split all the way up the seam -- well, it was good you brought a change of clothes!" She beamed. "Zell stared for the longest time."   
  
The other woman smiled; she looked a little bit uncomfortable and Rinoa wondered why, vaguely, though she was tired and Quistis probably was, too. "Your long sweater was the real problem on that trip," she answered after a moment, her voice rich and deep and dark. She had a sharp nose, a jawline riddled with scars that were almost completely healed; Rinoa had noticed them before, when she'd first met Quistis, but it had seemed rude to ask, and she hadn't after all. There were rumours in Balamb about Quistis's field test, but the records were locked, and nobody else would know. "It was always trailing in the mud and getting caught on trees. I wondered why we wore the things we wore, sometimes," she added, but there was no condemnation in her voice.   
  
Rinoa liked that about Quistis. Rebuke tinged her voice occasionally, yes, but condemnation never did. She'd always thought of Quistis as a good instructor -- Squall had thought highly of her, she knew. "I know it was," she replied, with a sheepish expression. "It was warm at night, though. And it made it easy for Angelo to find me. And," she added archly, "it wasn't a twinset."   
  
Quistis smiled. "There are a lot of things you can do in a twinset," she murmured, taking a sip of her coffee.   
  
The brunette felt heat rise in her face.   
  
"Like running," Quistis continued blithely. "It's much easier than you'd think."   
  
"You were always clipping yourself with the end of the Save the Queen," Rinoa felt neccessary to point out. "We used more bandages on your legs than anyone else." She'd been the one at Quistis' feet most often after a long day's journeys and battles, carefully changing the old bandages and applying new ones, clipping off useless flaps of skin and sniffing the wounds for signs of infection. She'd learned first aid as a matter of course in the Timber Owls -- the others were constantly getting hurt, unsurprisingly -- and it had fallen to her to fix things as best she could.   
  
She hadn't been very good at it when they'd started, clumsy and too rough.   
  
"That was a problem," Quistis admitted. "The worst was when Selphie got pneumonia, though. We'd always said she would, but she didn't listen to us."   
  
"And we were in the middle of nowhere, though, north of Trabia but too far from it to go back, not that they needed us, and that was where the Garden was stationed, too." Rinoa sighed, remembering the frantic nights of curing and magic that had followed Selphie's sudden -- and unexpected, if not unanticipated -- illness; remembered the wracking cough that rattled through the cold winter like an omen, the fever that wouldn't go down and oh, God, she was still chilled despite it, the brunette's sudden lethargy, the widespread panic, and the fear that they would be bringing a dead body to the Shumi village instead of a healthy young girl.   
  
"I was there when her fever finally broke," said Quistis, staring at her hands as though the secrets of nature might be there if she looked hard and long enough. Her eyes, as always, were intense. "That was the worst night. It was Zell and I with her, you remember how we split up the night watches, and . . . " She trailed off, eyes dark; her mind was back in that dark night in the snowfields, with frost gathering on the sides of the tent.   
  
*   
  
Nobody was sleeping well except Angelo, who was curled up against her, welcome and warm and thank God for Angelo because she needed a friend. They had tried to keep him with Selphie -- for warmth -- but her fever had made her delirious, and her delerium had made her sickeningly frightened of Angelo.   
  
She'd felt his eyes on her then. It had been a few days ago; long before the real terror, the life-death-inbetween edge-of-a-tenth-gil panic had set in. She'd wanted to say that she'd only tried, it hadn't even been her idea, anyway, but with Selphie wailing piteously in the background she hadn't had the heart or the courage. It was so much easier to leave things alone.   
  
Now, though, she was glad for Angelo's company. The tent she and Quistis shared -- Selphie had one to herself, always with someone watching her -- was dark, and the cold was thick around her. She could hear the hard snow hitting the sides of it, blown by the shrieking winds off the ground or from the weighed-down branches of trees. Their sleeping bags were warm enough for weather like this, but it wasn't the weather she was worried about.   
  
She was worried about Selphie, and, selfishly, surprisingly, about herself.   
  
She turned onto her stomach, letting Angelo lay his head on her back.   
  
Her breath turned into steam in the tent's freezing air, and she bit her lower lip, gently, so it wouldn't break the skin. She still had her vanities, even in crisis, and to look as though she was harried and worried sick looked so bad. She was glad, though, for the relative darkness in the tent, even if she couldn't sleep, and glad that Quistis was with Zell, tending Selphie, so that she had a few moments where she was sure nobody was watching. She wondered if Squall and Irvine were asleep, and hoped they were, because they were working so hard. She was, too -- but Selphie was still sick.   
  
She was doing everything she could, everything she possibly could, and it wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough, and she knew she had to try harder, but if Selphie died -- would it be her fault? And she felt so stupid, so childish, for wondering, but there it was: she was the outsider. Even if she knew -- and she knew! -- that it wasn't her fault, whose fault would it be when the time came for recrimination and blame?   
  
It was easier to point your finger at a newcomer than somebody you've known since they got their first yellow sundress, and easier still to resent her without pointing any fingers at all. She was in love with Squall, she knew that, never wanted him to be angry with her --   
  
It was the middle of the night at the edge of the snowfields in Trabia, and Selphie Tilmitt was dying of pneumonia, but all she could think of was herself. It made her angry and rebellious all at once. And she hated, hated, hated doing all of this, hated all the fighting, hated her chipped and scarred fingernails, hated the aiming and the shooting and the missing and the whole of it. How could she have thought herself a hardened terrorist? She couldn't even survive in the wildfire contagious enthusiasm of the Timber Owls. How could this have gone so wrong? She hated the glaciers and the mountains and the climbing and the fact that somebody was always, always, always reminding her to have three-point contact on the cliff, as though she could forget when it was just her hands and her feet keeping her away from falling a thousand feet to the sharp rocks below, and somehow they kept trying to betray her, trembling with her pounding heart and numb from the cold, and, oh, to have Squall's body --   
  
She was so distracted that she began to fall uneasily asleep, and when she was shaken awake by Quistis a few minutes later -- how long? The sky was still dark outside -- fear gripped her heart with claws that made the Sorceress' pointed fingers friendly. "What is it?" she gasped, turning over and sitting up so quickly that Angelo was forced to half-crawl sideways to get out of her way. "Is she -- "   
  
"The fever's broken," said the weary blonde, hair disheveled. "She's going to make it." There were dark, swollen circles underneath Quistis's eyes, dark clouds against the clear sky: they all looked that bad, but somehow on the sometime professor it looked worse. Quistis tanned only under certain circumstances, and with the fatigue and the worry of this particular tour of the Trabian mountains, she had skin that was more like Rinoa's. Blue veins showed starkly at her wrists.   
  
Rinoa was not surprised to find herself weeping: relief for Selphie and for herself mingling until her throat would not breathe without a sob. Quistis wrapped long awkward arms around her and held her for a few minutes, not unlike a mother, or an instructor -- or a friend that Rinoa remembered from before she'd ever imagined the pain of frostbitten ears or torn ligaments.   
  
*   
  
They sat in the cafe nursing their respective cups. Those nights in the frozen forests of the north were perhaps the most frightening: it was difficult to fight something you couldn't see and couldn't control. Steam clung to the windows of the small cafe, obscuring the street outside; the humidity and heat was nearly stifling.   
  
It was an uneasy silence they endured; one much like the silence she had endured with Squall, who hated to talk too much but said he liked to hear her voice. She'd stopped believing him after a few years of noncommittal grunting -- it was like talking to an ape, she reflected irritably, except that she was sure apes had more exciting sex lives and they got to run around naked and swing from trees and things.   
  
When they finally had to leave, she had Quistis' phone number and a light heart.   
  
*   
  
She woke up the next morning and showered and as she left her building on the way to work she discovered that they had tracked her down.   
  
They had found her and she didn't even know it. Of course they'd found her. There had been no ransom note, nothing to point to kidnapping, and even the ticketseller at the booth had seen her leave. Everyone had. Perhaps they could even guess why, if they looked deep deep down into their hearts, but she didn't know.   
  
And they had sent somebody she barely knew -- except, of course, by aquaintance (who didn't she know by aquaintance?) -- to talk her into coming back, so that they could tell the papers that she had just been taking some "Rinoa time", like a vacation. They could explain everything away if only she'd let them try.   
  
The courtyard was gray like the sky above them; brown treetrunks and greenish bushes rose above and beside them; she felt trapped, hated feeling trapped, hated that she had to do this and be here and hated that she didn't know what was going to happen.   
  
"He misses you, Rinoa," Edea said. She looked like a matron, like Squall's Matron, just now, dressed in a very plain dress with her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup.   
  
She didn't remind Rinoa of her own mother, who was bright and pretty and who smiled, whe let Rinoa dress up in her sparkly sweaters and high-heels; Rinoa's mother, who did not send children out to war.   
  
Rinoa hardened herself against this matron -- everyone's matron, but nobody's mother. Everyone's matron, but not her matron: Rinoa had never needed a surrogate.   
  
"He misses having someone to cook for him," Rinoa retorted, angry at the intrusion, angry that they'd try to change her mind. Her hair was loose and it flailed in the heavy spring winds of Deling. "He misses having clean floors and someone to make his bed. Not me."   
  
"He misses you," Edea said sharply. "Someone to kiss goodbye in the morning -- someone to talk to at supper -- someone to dance with who won't laugh at him. You."   
  
And then Rinoa laughed, because she could, because she was free and still in chains; still manacled to Squall, and to his secret childhood orphanage friends. It was so bizarre. "That isn't me," she said, and if tears stung her eyes it was only the sharp air. "It was never me, you know. I knew that after a year or two. Anyone who loved him would do those things. They'd -- you know, they'd do them freely. I did them at first because I wanted to, and later because he expected me to. Duty, you know, I was always good at that." She crossed her arms over her stomach, looking up at the storm-dark sky. Her eyes, now dry, were dark and hardly readable, cast up to the sky as though to say: That is all.   
  
"That isn't true," said Edea, but it was, and now they both knew it.   
  
"I never had anything with Squall except duty and romance," Rinoa went on, and if she was wistful, she was also angry, betrayed, too old and too young at the very same moment. She wondered if Edea would notice, if any of the so-called adults around them ever noticed how young they were, and how old they'd been made to become. You didn't even know me the first time I killed someone -- "I didn't even have with him what Selphie had with Irvine -- or Zell, the second time. You can't live with duty and romance. You resent duty, and romance -- it dies. It turns into habit and comfort."   
  
"He was your first love!" Such desperation.   
  
"He was a childhood crush." She swallowed, to drown the taste of bitter defeat in her mouth. She had tried, hadn't she? Tried so hard, for so many years, to be what the newspapers said.   
  
Edea stared at this pale-skinned girl, this resolute, ice-cold girl, and did not wonder if she had been wrong: SeeD had profiled Rinoa long ago, when the wedding was still simply a date a few months ahead and the day they'd saved the world was only just weeks before. They knew Rinoa, knew her better than she knew herself -- after all, the girl was terribly young, and hadn't had, growing up, the same community the others had. "You don't mean that," said Edea with certainty.   
  
Rinoa raised an eyebrow in an entirely uncharacteristic display of cool disbelief, and Edea's heart leapt into her throat, because this was not an expression she had ever seen on Rinoa's face; skepticism, untempered by teasing or play.   
  
And still Edea tried, earnestly, because she did not fail when she meant to do something. "Please come back, Rinoa,"   
  
"When I was little," she said, smiling a little bit, because she missed the days when her father told her anything, "my father told me that when he'd been in the military academy, he'd fallen in love with this classmate of his, a girl named Sylvia Hawthorne. He said he'd fancied himself so in love with her that he'd have done anything for her, let her marry him, given up the military for her."   
  
"That's beautiful," said Edea encouragingly, missing the point. "You see?"   
  
"They had a row," Rinoa continued, letting a slight smile quirk her lips, "about where to go for dinner one night. My father liked food from Dollet, but Sylvia liked the local cuisine better. They separated, kept on in school, and never spoke again. He still called her his first love." She bit her lip. "Squall and I just never had a row. How could you fight with him? He just doesn't talk back."   
  
The wind died down into a long silence. Edea did not reply.   
  
"I'm not going back," Rinoa said, uncrossing her arms and shoving her hands into the deep pockets of her winter jacket.   
  
"You need to find yourself?" Sarcastic, but perhaps only out of despair.   
  
She laughed then, slightly wildly. "What's there to find?" she asked, when her breath had run out and her hysteria had calmed itself. "It's not that I don't know who I am. It's that I can't be that person and still--still cater to him. I can't be a partner to a child."   
  
"He was good to you!" and now the old matron was shouting, face reddening not just from the cold, hands gesturing at Rinoa's chest as though her lungs had something to do with her betrayal of him, and, subsequently, them. "You never had to work! You never saw death, you never saw anguish, you never even saw his office! He remembered your birthday, and your anniversary, and he spent time with you just to see you, even when he was busy! He was a good husband!"   
  
Rinoa laughed again, but this time it was controlled, bitter, a gesture meant to lash out at the old woman. Cruel, she thought, but not unjustified. "Yes," she said. "He remembered my birthday, and he bought me pretty clothes, and he did everything he could. But none of that matters," she said, "because I didn't love him, and I don't love him, and I will never love him."   
  
There was a long, thick silence, interrupted by the wind picking up again and whistling over the tops of buildings, raging through the branches of the trees. It reached a tumultuous crescendo before dying away, leaving leaves rattling across the stout gray stones.   
  
Edea walked away.   
  
The next day, the newspapers declared an end to the search. She had been found, yes: but she had been unwilling to return. The editorials raged, and she kept them in her scrapbook, carefully cutting along the edges of words which declared her ungrateful, unfeeling, unlovable; and once she had done that, she put it on her desk but did not read it again as she had before, reveling that her name was in the newspaper. Those days, she felt, were gone.   
  
She called Quistis and asked if they could meet. She wasn't sure what she'd say when they did. She just felt it was important.   
  
*   
  
They met back in the cafe, at the now-unfogged window which overlooked the ocean.   
  
Quistis was graceful. She walked with surety; her smooth lithe form swung slightly from side-to-side as she did. It was the walk Rinoa had tried so many years ago to perfect, the balance between frivolous movement and ladylike elegance. She'd never quite succeeded; she moved quickly, with emotion, with energy. Her nanny had hated that. It had worked, though, for the Timber Owls, where she had to be quick to survive.   
  
"Hi!" said Rinoa with a bright smile, wondering through the first moments if she ought to have worn makeup.   
  
"Hello," Quistis replied with a smile, sitting with more grace than Rinoa had ever exhibited in her entire life -- except for dancing, which was different. Dancing was music and matching your footsteps and pairing yourself with someone. Nothing was quite like it; she hadn't danced for years.   
  
"How are you?" Rinoa asked, feeling foolish and silly. She was quite sure people like Quistis didn't waste time with small talk like this.   
  
"Fine," Quistis murmured. She seemed strangely -- pulled; her skin wrapped around her cheeks too tightly, and Rinoa realised with astonishment, with some worry, that the other woman had lost weight, perhaps too much of it.   
  
"Are you sure?" she pushed, determined not to be afraid because this was Quistis, and she was not afraid of anyone -- but especially not Quistis. She would not be afraid, and it was stupid to be afraid -- and she was afraid despite common sense, because she had a vague reason   
  
"Of course," said Quistis lightly, and for some reason -- no, for one reason, singular -- Rinoa leaned foreward and kissed her. It was not a flashy kiss -- nor long -- and after she'd done it she realised just how stupid it had been, how rushed, how insincere, how incredibly foolish. It lasted for a short moment, or perhaps a long one -- relativity had never quite been Rinoa's strong suit, but she pulled away as the blush crept from her neck to her jaw to her cheekbones to her hairline, trying not to look like a child who had just been caught doing something forbidden.   
  
She was not rebuked or shouted at. There was something terribly sad in Quistis' expression; it was a longing Rinoa was not altogether sure she understood. "Sunset," said the blonde, quite quietly. "The place where gold and silver waters meet but do not touch. A poet from this region said that to me once. It's true, isn't it?"   
  
Rinoa wasn't sure she understood. She wondered if she looked as stupid as she felt, gaping and slack-jawed and unhappy.   
  
"I don't want to be a part of this," Quistis said, and her voice was steady, steadier than Rinoa's had ever been, low and smooth and sure. It was the voice of a professor -- the voice of the youngest doctorate graduate in the city, she told herself, feeling smaller than before, and more unsure every moment. She bit her lip and stared at her hands, which were so dry that the skin on her knuckles was cracked. She hadn't expected it to be so hard on her skin.   
  
She imagined that didn't matter much anymore.   
  
"What do you mean?" she asked, eyebrows knit together in a sort-of frown. She felt very awkward and very young, as though Quistis was not her age but some sort of adult many years her senior. It was the way she had felt with Edea not so long ago, but it lacked the animosity that had overshadowed that encounter.   
  
Quistis exhaled slowly, as though collecting her thoughts. "It's just," she said, "that I don't want to be a part of you and Squall anymore, Rinoa. You and everyone else."   
  
Her stomach churned. "Oh," she said faintly.   
  
"I left because of it," she said. Her face was calm, like the mythical gods of old as they crushed cities beneath their feet.   
  
A flare of emotion prompted her to say, cheeks burning, "That's why I left!"   
  
"You left," said Quistis, "for an entirely different reason."   
  
And then, as though to prove a point, she walked away. Rinoa stood there for a long while, confused and stung, and then she, too, left, leaving money on the table without waiting for change.   
  
Stupid, stupid girl. Choose your battles.   
  
*   
  
The next day she woke up, showered for a long time, and went to work, and the water washed the stains of tears from her face and made her red nose go pale again.   
  
Where elation had brought her up before, its memory slapped her now, and she realised that her bleak long war was not yet over.   
  
TBC   
  
A/N: Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the people who reviewed -- Guardian, Amber Tinted, scribblemoose, achenar, jeangab057, Kyra, Kurt1K, and lunita, to be specific. ;) Although I am not one of those authors who depends on reviews to keep her writing (look at my Sailormoon stuff!) I do honestly, sincerely appreciate and pore over every comment I get, so thank you once again. I'm looking at revising chapter one once this trilogy is over -- I will keep it within three chapters! -- because I'm not as pleased as I was once with it, but thank you to everyone who's stuck with me through approximately ten-thousand words of slightly mad drivel. 


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